Dua Lipa is Nespresso’s new global ambassador; Maya Hawke and KJ Apa are starring in a Shakespeare-inspired rom-com; Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s 28-year-old son Charlie Hall is, as Vanity Fair puts it, “the latest nepo baby to join The White Lotus”; speaking of, Cruz Beckham is playing Lollapalooza; and “if Mean Girls was set at a Free People in 2026, you’d get Forbidden Fruits.”
PEOPLE ARE MAKING MONEY BETTING ON PRETAPED ‘SURVIVOR’ EPISODES, nyt
Kalshi and Polymarket are now offering prediction markets on pretaped reality shows like Survivor (which is having a somewhat unexpected moment with Gen Z), The Bachelorette, and Top Chef, creating a financial incentive to leak outcomes filmed months earlier. The Survivor Season 50 winner market has hit $9.5 million in total trade volume on Kalshi, with one of 20 remaining contestants listed at 86% odds; ahead of last week’s episode, one player was given 98% elimination odds and was indeed voted out. How curious…! No one has ever been legally charged for insider trading on prediction markets, and enforcement is unlikely: the Trump administration has supported looser regulation of prediction markets, with Donald Trump Jr. serving as both an investor in Polymarket and a paid adviser to Kalshi.
WOULD YOU SPEND $1,000 A MONTH ON SUPPLEMENTS?, wsj
Supplement “stacking” — i.e. taking dozens of capsules, powders, and injections daily — is fueling a $70 billion industry whose products don’t undergo FDA approval for safety or efficacy before hitting the market. Biohacker Dave Asprey says he does “150 supplements a day,” Bryan Johnson was at 111 daily before scaling back (presumably because he fell in love and no longer needs them — no supplement is stronger than oxytocin), and the top 20% of users on the 675,000-user tracking app SuppCo spend $479/month on supplements. Younger men are especially susceptible: 28-year-old Dylan Amble in North Carolina assembled a $115/month stack partly to hedge against testosterone decline he’d heard about on podcasts; he considers himself a “softmaxxer,” meaning he “doesn’t take things that far.” Celebrity nutritionist Mona Sharma called this phenomenon “a new addiction.”
IT’S NOW LAME TO BE ON YOUR PHONE ALL THE TIME, esquire
Americans check their phones on average once every five minutes, nearly 90% look at devices within the first ten minutes of waking up, and 57% admit to smartphone addiction. Gen Z logs roughly six hours of daily screen time versus four and a half for millennials and four for Gen Xers, yet 60% of young people now say social media causes harm to society, compared with just 32% who cite positive effects. (This goes back to what I wrote about on Tuesday: the people yearn to disconnect and go analog, but few will actually do it.) “Being chronically online is gauche now,” kate lindsay recently wrote in Embedded, describing lack of screen time as “a new social indicator.” She believes the intense social-media use of the past decade is merely a “blip,” a period of overuse “born out of an excitement about a new toy.” I love Kate and I hope she’s right, but I sadly have my doubts!
THE INFLUENCER KIDS WHO GREW UP ONLINE AND NEVER LOGGED OFF, yahoo
A counterpoint to the above: One survey found 86% of young Americans want to be influencers, and the first generation of children raised on family vlogging channels is now entering adulthood eagerly capitalizing on their built-in audiences: Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight, 26-year-old twins who were first featured on their mother’s YouTube channel at age 9, have 7.5 million TikTok followers, 9.6 million on Instagram, and 7.4 million YouTube subscribers, with multiple businesses and what Reddit speculates to be a lot of money. While Brooklyn has not yet shown her baby on social media, some of the former child influencers reporter Fortesa Latifi spoke to say they plan to make their own children the stars of family vlogging content when they become parents. “I don’t know who I am without a social media following,” said Avia Butler, 20, who grew up with her childhood documented on what’s widely recognized as one of the first family vlogging channels.
THE COLLEGE-EDUCATED WORKING CLASS, theatlantic
A generation of college graduates is entering a workforce where the pay gap between college and high-school grads has stopped growing over the past two decades, degree costs are soaring, and desirable jobs are shrinking — or what scholar Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction.” Sick of feeling like “members of the rank and file,” these downwardly mobile graduates — Starbucks “partners,” Apple Store “creatives,” Amazon “associates,” etc. — are driving the most union activism in almost half a century. I thought this bit was especially interesting:
How sorry can you feel for an underemployed Hollywood scriptwriter who makes ends meet through a “sugar dating” app, as a companion for wealthy older men? These young graduates start out naive about the heartlessness of the corporate world and harbor illusory hopes for success in unforgiving professions…The college-educated are trained to expect that the world will make room for them, and when it doesn’t—when they suffer the indignities of wage work, with its unpredictable schedules and disrespectful bosses, and can see no way up or out—the blow isn’t just economic; it’s psychological. “They were often bourgeois in their tastes,” [New York Times labor reporter Noam] Scheiber writes. “They cradled sleek smartphones and expensive cups of coffee. They watched prestige TV on demand. But the previous decade and a half had bequeathed them the bank accounts—and the politics—of the proletariat.”
One last thought:
